Welcome To Hellville - Part 3 (1/2) By Rich Mills 22nd October 2040

Next Page, Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Boring! It's far too wet and miserable to venture outside for a good few days now. Six months and that's it - I'm out of here. Eight at the very most! All depends on how fast I can save to get myself over to the Southern Hemisphere. That's where anyone who can afford to is heading. Europe, North America, what was once the centre of civilization (so called) for hundreds of years, is now a desolate third world shit-hole.

Not that back in the day when the countries of the Southern Hemisphere were described as Third World they were shit-holes, just that Europe and North America are now little more than third world countries and shit-holes as well. I'm just writing rambling rubbish here, not that it matters really. Who reads anymore anyway?

Statisticians tell us that at least half of the world can't read. The written word is dead and buried, its all flash hyper-real 3D graphics and super-duper-wrap-round-surround-sound, etc...

I'm do a dying job, but one that keeps me happy, so not arsed really! As a web journalist I can quite happily sit at home write a load of trite crap that I know nobody will read and still eek out a meager living at the same time. After all I work to live, not live to work. Now that I'm saving like a mad thing to escape, I've had to sort out some extra work. In fact tripling my workload, but it keeps me busy over the long wet season stuck in here until the waters recede from my doorstep.

Sitting here surrounded by real books (as opposed to ethereal e-books) I'm a freak. No-one owns books these days, only a few collectors. New books on paper are rare, and hugely collectable to those who care about keeping the printed word alive.

Dad's a book fiend, many of the books that I have were his once. Ones he's passed onto me, in the hope I'd keep his obsession going. It worked and here I am banging away at a keyboard. Ah, the feeling of banging away at a keyboard is quite satisfying; I've never fancied the idea of getting a bio-port implant, and hooking myself directly up to the machine.

I can remember when it was all the rage, when they finally cracked the problem of melding man and machine without the initial problems of rejection, and the first people to get them frying their brains when they logged-on. Though I was so happy when I heard Bill Gates died trying to download his mind into a machine, in the hope he could live forever in cyber-space. What a fool.

However once they'd perfected the technology everyone wanted one. I resisted, even though I did fancy the idea for a while. It seemed that those that had the implants suddenly took an evolutionary leap, able to interact in a whole new virtual world, learn at a fantastically rapid rate, control their whole environment without even moving a muscle, just at the mere speed of a single thought. It all seemed so wonderful, and that the mistakes of the past had been finally overcome. Then the urban-myths started, horror stories of mutated creatures lurking in dark bedrooms, overloaded on cerebral-porn and frontal-lobe-link-up.

People taking synthesized neuron enhancers, brain steroids and vast quantities of amphetamines so they could stay on-line for days on end.

Living in their preferred virtual worlds than the real one out here, people were believed to have gone insane, and gone on murderous rampages when their connections had dropped, slamming them back to reality with such a jolt, they simply couldn't handle it. Living in a phantom world between the real and the virtual one they had created, The Rage took hold of them. At first these stories were little more than urban-myth, no-one had ever directly come across someone this sort of thing had happened to.

It was always a case of your mate had a mate, who knew someone it had happened to. But slowly the cases started cropping up much closer to home. There was the gang I used to live with, it happened to some of them.

Continued Welcome To Hellville - Part 3 By Rich Mills.. Next Page

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